I work from home on my own computer, so of course I have a bunch of apps to get me through the day. You know, I listen to music, send and respond to email, and am constantly using one browser or another. To tell you I stream music using Spotify or use Safari to browse isn’t really letting you in on any secrets of how I get through my day or giving out any tips on what apps I can’t live without.

Instead of looking to the more conspicuous apps that I use everyday and always have open, I want to let you in on some of the apps that don’t seem so integral at first blush, but that I just can’t make it through the day without. (more…)

How many hours do you spend in front of your Mac each day? The internet is where we find our entertainment and where we go to work. It’s easy to lose track of how much time you’ve spent sitting in front of the screen, and if that number gets to be a big number of hours per day, then you ought to change a few habits, don’t you think?

Today we’ll be showing you a few apps for minimizing bad habits with your computer usage. We’ve got it all: apps that remind you to take a break once in a while from your computer, apps that help you stay focused on your tasks so that you can have more time for yourself, and utilities for reducing eye strain. Let’s do this!(more…)

Hey, it’s Matthew, the editor here and on Web.AppStorm. Ever wondered which apps I use to get my work done each day?

For the past few weeks, we’ve been running a series of articles about the Apps We Use, letting you get a peek into the workflow of each of the writers on our team. I’m up this week, and here’s the apps that are most important to me — the apps I require to get work done, productively, on my Mac.

With two Macs on rotation — an iMac and a MacBook Air — plopped on top of 20 years on Apple’s side of the operating system fence, I’ve come to use a lot of apps. More even than I can think of off the top of my head, in fact. But some stick out as essential daily drivers, without which I’d struggle to get anything done.

Here’s a choice selection of the apps I use and rely upon nearly every day.(more…)

It’s a new week with a new set of apps we use daily. Much like Jacob, the first writer in this series, the apps I use vary daily with a few exceptions. But without fail, I will fire up my MacBook Pro and use a bunch of apps throughout the day. Some of the apps on my list are well-known favorites, others a little less known.

Putting together this list has been a joy; hopefully you’ll enjoy it too!

There’s so many apps in the App Store and elsewhere for the Mac, there’s no way anyone could use them all. We sure don’t. Each of us on the Mac.AppStorm team has our favorite apps that we use for work and more every day, the apps that have stood the test of time for us. We thought you might like to see the Mac apps we each find most important, so we’re starting a new series. Jacob’s first, with his favorite apps, and check back next Wednesday for another of our writers’ favorite apps.

And now, over to Jacob:

Here’s my formulaic morning: Get up and eat breakfast, then open my MacBook Air and start work. What is “work”? That depends on the day. Sometimes it’s writing industry-related news, other times it’s reviewing the latest FarmVille clone, and once in a while I get to do a roundup. Today happens to be one of those roundup days, and I’m excited about it because I get to share some cool stuff with you.

Have you ever wondered what a writer here uses for his daily duties? It’s time to find out, starting with my personal Launchpad of top hits.

Since the emergence of Dropbox, many cloud services have spawned all over the internet, and you probably use a few or all of them. From desktops and video games in the cloud to file-sharing, file-syncing cloud services, you are bound to have a membership to at least one – even if you didn’t intend to.

That isn’t a bad thing, though. As many of you may know, cloud services are extremely useful for school, work, or personal use, not to mention that the cloud will most likely be our future. Because of this, today we will cover the top cloud services and some applications that support them. (more…)

Information managers, or Bucket apps, are applications that store and organize the notes and text snippets (and more) that we’d like to keep up with. They’re versatile apps that can work to organize pretty much any type of data you want to store in them. There are plenty of them to choose from, however, in this article we’ll narrow this list into five contestants: DEVONthink, Eaglefiler, Evernote, Together and Yojimbo.

Each one is packed with exclusive features and some missing when compared to the other options. In this review I’ll highlight the pros and cons of the Buckets keeping in mind a criterion that could bring them all together: how they add, organize and search through your files. Then, we’ll try to help you find the best one for your needs.

I tend to use my Mac’s desktop as a place to dump the files I’m currently working with, and as a writer and app reviewer, that means I’ve got a dozen or more screenshots and markdown files on my desktop at any given time. It works, but gets a bit messy, and while it makes it easy to drag-and-drop images into articles when I’m working in a normal sized window, it’s not so simple when I’m writing in full-screen mode.

Unclutter is a neat new app from the people behind DaisyDisk that aims to solve this this problem. It’s a rather useful little tool once you’re used to using it, enough that I kept it around even though I didn’t anticipate using it much when I first tried it out.

Outliners are handy for a lot of different things: task lists, outlining longer manuscripts, or note taking to name a few. For some users, bullet list functions available in your standard work processor or note taking app are all you need, while other users prefer the functions provided by dedicated outlining apps.

If you are—or think you might be—in the latter category, read on to for a review of three of the top outlining apps. We’ve taken Scribe, Tree, and OmniOutliner Standard for a run and compared their features in-depth, so you can find the best Mac outlining app for your needs.